Can Good Hair Save The World?

Is there an appropriate 'do for a female head of state? As more women take on powerful roles, Vogue health and beauty director Nicola Moulton looks at the styles in command in this piece from the magazine's November issue.

Watching the Democratic National Convention on TV, I am transfixed by Hillary Clinton. Dressed in a blinding white trouser suit, a nimbus of blonde hair round her head, she looks like more than a candidate for president: a female superhero, perhaps, or “white hat” – the nickname for the good cowboy in old Hollywood films. Her white suit has a hint of televangelist or even Elvis, that modern semi-deity; while her blonde hair – “We’ve definitely taken it blonder,” confirms her hairdresser, John Barrett – speaks volumes.

A “quasi-mystical image of light and vitality” is how Marina Warner describes the blondeness of the fairy-tale beauty in From the Beast to the Blonde, her study of women in myth and fairy tale. Traditionally, to be blonde wasn’t just to be light-haired, it was to be “fair” as opposed to “foul”. In fairy tales, female hair operates like cowboys’ hats in old movies: the good girl is blonde, the bad girl is brunette. The only exception is Snow White.

What it points to is this: hair matters. It matters more for women than it does for men. That may be changing (hello, “coiffeurgate”, the political story of the last silly season in which it was reported that François Hollande’s hair cost the public purse €10,000 a month), and it is almost certainly sexist, but let’s leave all that for now. There are more women in power than at any other time in history. Hillary Clinton may have yet to confirm her spot, but Theresa May, Nicola Sturgeon, Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde have already taken up theirs.

Advertisement

Theresa May, outside 10 Downing Street

Getty

Imagine if you were one of them doing an outside broadcast. A sudden gust of wind and the day’s headlines are less about the good news you delivered about the economy and instead all about your unfortunate “bad hair day”. Or, heaven forbid, you were so busy helping to run the country that you didn’t have time to dry your hair properly, so you scraped it back into a ponytail and caused a national outcry (Hillary Clinton’s 2011 “scrunchiegate” phase during her tenure as US secretary of state).

Read next

Duchess Of Sussex: Hair Style File

ByLisa Niven-Phillips

In addition, the professional world has never been more visual. Even for women whose jobs do not thrust them on to the world stage, chances are they’re giving presentations, appearing in video footage or being photographed at work events. Julie Meyer, an American in London who heads her own venture-capital company, videos weekly economic briefings via her own Youtube channel. She believes the worlds of business and entertainment will become increasingly aligned. “I work in the technology world where form really is content,” she says.

Advertisement

But what if you are employed for your ideas, not your looks, yet you find yourself in a world where you are being judged as much on how you look as what you’re saying? You probably have neither the time nor the inclination to spend as many hours on grooming as a Hollywood celebrity. On the one hand, hair is, as Warner says, one of the key ways to express the self, on the other, it’s hair, legitimate to worry about if you are, say, an actress, but surely not if you are a CEO, a top academic or candidate for president of the United States? Some high-profile women I requested to interview about hair refused. And I found myself thinking that, in their position, I would have too.

But others were able to reel off a well-honed strategy without even blinking, hair being just one of many “life hacks” that encompass everything from their travel arrangements to wardrobe management.

Angela Merkel

Getty

Read next

A Love Letter To Hair Conditioner

ByLauren Murdoch-Smith

“Presentation is very important in my role, and that includes my personal presentation,” says Vivien Ryan, a director at Pricewaterhouse Coopers, who co-authored the “Powerful Women” report, which considered the role of women in powerful positions within the energy sector. “Travel to New York is commonplace and often I’ll be in a meeting the moment we land. My hair is cut monthly so that I can ‘wrap-dry’ it [for the uninitiated: wrap-drying means pushing hair over to the opposite side and using a smoothing nozzle] and style it with a Denman brush. To finish, I spray my hairspray on a Mason Pearson extra-stiff brush. I find spraying the brush keeps the spray even and coated throughout, and it can stay for hours. I use a GHD Flight hairdryer when travelling and have a slightly larger one at home so I know exactly how they behave.”

Advertisement

Vasiliki Petrou is executive vice-president at Unilever Prestige. “I have a once-a-week standing appointment with a hairdresser,” she says, “on a Saturday afternoon. My hair then lasts until Wednesday, if I eke it out with a dry shampoo. Then, depending on my diary, I will probably do it myself, using rollers and getting up early to do it properly before work. Volume is the only thing that will make hair look good in a professional environment. It looks ‘done’. I would never put my hair in a ponytail for work. It doesn’t look groomed. It’s not being respectful to the job you’re doing.” Petrou believes the blow-dry-bar trend has helped, “but it’s still very much aimed at young women who want ‘going out’ hair, not at executives,” she says, saying that earlier opening hours and faster turnaround would be helpful.

Christine Lagarde

Getty

Control freakery is a characteristic to which many powerful women will confess. That’s why the short, masculine haircut is favoured by women in power. It is discreet, non-sexual, and it says “woman able to compete in a man’s world”. It’s also fairly bulletproof against the weather. But what it gains in practicality, it most certainly lacks in imagination.

The short bob, known as the “political bob” or “pob”, is the thinking woman’s hairstyle of choice. Angela Merkel, Theresa May, Hillary Clinton and Christine Lagarde are only the most prominent examples in public life. Christine Lagarde’s pob is impeccably chic, as French as an Hermès scarf. It gives her a natural air of authority. Mrs May’s selling point is that she is a safe pair of hands, her catchphrase: “I get on with the job.” Her less chic, more bureaucratic-style pob reinforces the workhorse message. “A pob says you’re serious, you get the job done,” says the hairstylist Sam McKnight.

Read next

Alexa Chung: Hair Style File

ByLisa Niven-Phillips

Over here, you express your seriousness by downplaying your hair

Nicola Sturgeon’s is an intriguing variation. It’s too spiky to be indifferent; but not quite daring enough to break the mould. To the untrained eye, it appears unmovable and always the same, but, explains her hairdresser, Julie McGuire, there are subtle tweaks according to the messaging required. “Razoring and tapering produces a softer edge to the cut, whereas blow-drying with minimal product achieves a more businesslike effect,” she says. “Nicola prefers a light and layered look for easy maintenance. Monthly visits are enough to keep her going. She’s not high-maintenance at all. She’s very relaxed and enjoys a little bit of sanctuary away from the demands of her high-profile job.” The “favourite shoot”, says McGuire, was last year’s Vogue editorial. “Nicola and I then got to play a bit more, and style it the way I like it. A bit more rock’n’roll!”

Nicola Sturgeon, photographed for Vogue

Benjamin McMahon

But rock-chick moments notwithstanding, the pob also says that while you are a woman, and therefore true to yourself, you are not too far from a man. It’s as if women leaders feel they still have to give reassurance that they can hack it by assuming some manliness. Elizabeth I, addressing the troops at Tilbury in 1588, said: “I know I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” As she came out to address them she was preceded by a page bearing her helmet on a silver cushion, while she herself was mounted on a white horse, dressed in white and wearing a silver cuirass… somewhat like a 16th Century Hillary Clinton.

The pob confers gravitas, as Sam McKnight, the man who practically invented it, knows. When he began doing Diana, Princess of Wales’s hair in 1990 he changed her style from a big Eighties ’do to something more casual: a modern short bob. “But I couldn’t change it too much, because she wanted to be taken seriously. I used to say to her, ‘You looked great in the paper today coming out of the gym with your hair natural.’ And she would say, ‘Yes, I know, but I’m going to visit some OAPs in Newcastle today and they don’t want to see me with gym hair. They want to see that I’ve made an effort.’”

Read next

A Love Letter To Hair Accessories

ByVenetia Scott

More than 20 years on, her daughter-in-law feels no need to crop her long barrel curls. And there are increasing numbers of women out there with great jobs and great - longer - hair. Amal Clooney comes to mind, as does Dambisa Moyo, who sits on the boards of Barclays and Barrick Gold, and Caroline Dalmeny, who works in nuclear defence.

The Duchess of Cambridge's classic blow-dry

Getty

Julie Meyer thinks that it is a generational thing. “Business leaders and politicians wear the short bob because it was around when they came of age in the Eighties,” she says. Approaching her 50th birthday, Meyer herself is comfortable wearing her blonde hair over her shoulders: “Your hair is part of your sexual identity. If you are not comfortable with that, then you are not comfortable with who you are.”

“Can you look sexy and feminine and work in the White House?” Dr Pippa Malmgren shakes her head. “I would have to say no. I know I didn’t.” As a former adviser on economic policy to President George W Bush, she knows whereof she speaks. “When you are working at that level, the most valuable commodity is time. If you take your sexuality into the room with you, you’re distracting others – you’re not fixing the problem at hand.”

Now in her early fifties, Malmgren has unapologetically feminine hair that tumbles in auburn locks to her shoulders. When I catch up with her she is at an economics boot camp with Britain’s minister for trade, thrashing out the future of post-Brexit Britain. She may not have felt able to express her femininity at the White House, but she has no problem with it now. “No one wants to be called ‘honey’ and ‘babe’ in the boardroom. But at the same time, why should you check your sexuality at the door? I’m a former cheerleader from Texas. This is me. I guess I reverted to my natural self when I felt I had enough credentials. When no one would dream of calling me ‘babe’.”

Read next

Duchess Of Cambridge: Hair Style File

ByLisa Niven-Phillips

Amal Clooney, during the United Nations General Assembly

Getty

There is a difference in attitude to hair either side of the Atlantic. Over here, you express your seriousness by downplaying your hair – deflating it, even. “When I first went to a British hairdresser,” recalls Malmgren, “he looked at my hair and said, ‘We can fix this, take the oomph out of it.’” It’s as if we believe the more oomph to your hair, the more you are literally an airhead. And the more your hair looks like money and time, the less left-wing you are. No left-wing politician wants to be called a champagne socialist, but shampoo socialist would definitely be worse.

Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe is Britain’s minister of state for energy and intellectual property. She has found a way to use the “hair effect” to her advantage by turning hers into a bold statement. A striking 63-year-old with a natural ability to captivate an audience, she dyes her hair dark brown with a brightly coloured flash running through the fringe. It’s been blue, green and orange in its time, and is just fantastic. It has also become a signature that means: a) no one is wondering whether she’s had a blow-dry that day or whether or not she’s concealing any grey, and b) she is “confident” and ‘in control”.

Think of it as like being an Olympic swimmer – you are always looking for the edge that shaves a millisecond from your personal-best time. A vital millisecond that could make the difference between winning and losing. Or think of your hair as your hardware, says Meyer. “Jony Ive, Bill Gates, they understand the importance of design. Think of your appearance as the design aspect of what you want to get across,” she says.

Michelle Obama at the Beating the Odds Summit at the White House

Rex

Read next

Sam McKnight On The Wet-Look Hair At Chanel's Métiers d’Art

ByJessica Diner

Thinking of your hair as a kind of iPad is one thing, but knowing whether to go for the hairdo equivalent of an iPad Pro, Air or Mini is quite another. “We don’t have enough examples of what women in power look like,” says Lauren A Rothman, a Washington-based image consultant. “We’re breaking the glass ceiling right now so we have to pull examples from women who are not Hollywood-type celebs but are in the world of politics.” She would take “pieces from Margaret Thatcher to Michelle Obama to create what a woman in power should look like right now.” While it’s hard to imagine what the “Maggie Michelle” might look like on someone’s head, in terms of emotional intelligence, it’s on message.

Mrs Thatcher’s Iron Lady helmet hair gave her what Josh Wood – the hairstylist to many a power-broking west London female executive – calls, “that aura of super-grooming which makes people believe that those in power know what they’re doing. We almost don’t want them to look like us.” On the other hand, there is a part of us that does want them to look like us, for which read: approachable, warm. “Mrs Clinton has to show her great power and her great intelligence,” says John Barrett. But you have to wonder whether she is showing that almost too abundantly already. She could be using her hair to “feminise” her message, soften her, make her more one of the gals. This is the quality Michelle Obama has. As the hairstylist Sam McKnight puts it, “Her hair looks confident without screaming ‘power’. She exudes modern, democratic power.”

But then Michelle is not a candidate for president, she is the first lady. And it’s striking how many present and former “first ladies” are at ease with dresses and skirts, and longer hair. Samantha Cameron and Sylvia Bongo Ondimba, wife of the president of Gabon, are examples. Long hair gives a message of youth, fertility and plenty. Marina Warner describes the thick blonde plait crowning the head of Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine, as “like a dowry”. Similarly, the Trump women surround Donald on stage like assurances of luxe and plenty, their blonde hair cascading in Botticelli tresses to their breasts.

Advertisement

Hillary Clinton during the final presidential debate of the 2016 election

Getty

Josh Wood mentions Sarah Palin as a presidential candidate who had “longer, first-lady hair”. But he adds: “That hair would have been whacked off into a bob if she’d got any further politically.” Would we have taken her more seriously as a result? Possibly. Or perhaps we would have seen it as another example of her mind not really being on the job in hand.

“The kind of woman who comes on Newsnight doesn’t fiddle with her hair.” We’ve been discussing hair for almost 20 minutes now and Kirsty Wark sounds exasperated. “I’ve got 10 minutes before I go on. I just pop a couple of rollers in and that’s that. And I always use Elnett, because the smell reminds me of my mother.” Hold on a minute… Kirsty Wark goes into verbal battle on behalf of the nation each night wearing an invisible matriarchial helmet? Of course. Forward, Kirsty! Now let’s get on with the serious stuff.